March 12, 2012

Attended the Windows 8 TechConference

I’ve just arrived home from a long day (mainly because of the 4-hour round-trip rail travel) at the Windows TechConference in Baden, Switzerland, focused on Windows 8. It was a pretty interesting day – thankfully, as I’m still a bit jetlagged from my trip to California, and I didn’t want to doze off in the lecture theatre. And yes, I’ve certainly dozed during a few lectures in my time, but not since leaving University.

The main developer-oriented session I attended – which covered writing a WinRT application to pull down Teletext into a XAML + C# application, which was just my kind of demo – taught me a valuable lesson: do not sit up front during a demo focused on Metro UI development – which tends to involve lots and lots of horizontal scrolling – especially when the amphitheatre has cinema-style seating (it was held in a cinema) and you’ve been plied with lots of free food. I nearly had to leave when motion sickness made me feel distinctly nauseous. :-S :-)

But there were some genuinely interesting takeaways from that session: Microsoft are doing a typically pragmatic job of marrying the new with the legacy. Windows 8 will provide an interesting environment for applications, with legacy “desktop” applications (whether using native and/or managed code) will happily co-exist with code running inside the WinRT sandbox. I’m itching to install and play with Windows 8 preview (now that that the Windows 8 consumer preview is available, I expect it’s better to go with that), using the Visual Studio 2011 Beta to build my first Metro-style app.

Another comment on the XAML + C# session: all the coding during that session was performed on a tablet device – albeit one with an external keyboard and mouse – which was pretty cool. A lot of comments were made around the slate’s array of external ports and extensibility options, which was a clear dig at the iPad’s lack of them.

There was a fun session talking about the Metro design language, and how it was inspired by bauhaus (being reductionist and functionality-focused), Swiss typography (clearly a crowd-pleaser, here) and motion design.

The other interesting developer-oriented session was a deep dive into WinRT, which showed some of what was going on under the hood in Windows 8. I have a better understanding of the Windows 8 architecture, at this stage, but still need to look into it more deeply (which I expect to share via this blog).